One of the things I was most surprised by was that when CEDET was
integrated into Emacs, only 2 people tried it and reported anything
from this list. I fixed those things too. Now this list is posting
things that effectively pretend CEDET doesn't exist. What's up with
that?

Where on the Emacs documentation can I learn about CEDET? On an Emacs
compiled a few days ago, I did
M-h i S cedet [ENTER]
and it turned nothing. M-x cedet [TAB] returns nothing too.

There is no "cedet" command. CEDET is a name on sourceforge that holds
a host of other tools like semantic, ede, or srecode. See the front
page here:

Perhaps I should have started by saying that CEDET/Semantic satisfies
smart code completion requirement to help here.

I tried CEDET several years ago with my C++ projects and it was of no
use (slow, highly inaccurate, slowed down text editing.) I'm sure things
have improved a lot since that experience (the CEDET docs mentioned that
its C++ support was very rough) and I'll like to try again. Guess that I
must go to the CEDET website.

I would have to agree with your performance statement. A while back I
built a set of profiling tools and ran against some very large code
bases, and tuned the parser / analyzer gaining some huge performance
boosts. In one experiment I went from an 8 minute analysis down to 1.5
seconds or so. There is still lots of overhead for parsing everything
the first time, but once the databases are there, keeping the tags
databases up to date and running smart completion is pretty fast now.

Naturally time-outs and work loads are configurable. Having Emacs
developers use these tools and tweak these straight-forward
configurations to come up with some better defaults would be great,
especially since I don't write code for a living any more and thus lack
some of that insight. ;(

Note that my results are with Emacs 23.1 and CEDET from the sourceforge
project. I would expect the integrated version to be the same.